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EUROPEAN SUMMER SCHOOL IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
PRESENTATION
The European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR) is a scientific event founded in 1990, which gave rise to a series of Summer Schools held on a regular temporal basis to provide high quality teaching of information retrieval and advanced information retrieval topics to a mostly European audience of researchers and research students. ESSIR is typically a week-long event consisting of guest lectures and seminars from invited lecturers who are recognized experts in the field.
The scope of the ESSIR is to give to its participants a grounding in the core subjects of Information Retrieval (IR), which is the science concerned with the effective and efficient retrieval of documents by their semantic content. IR is concerned with all those activities that permit to choose, from a given collection of documents, those documents that are of interest in relation to a specific information need. IR activities are those that permit to reach the target of choosing the documents of the collection that are probably relevant to the initial information need in an automatic way, because the IR concern is on collections of documents that are available in digital forms and an automatic IR system/service is used in choosing documents.
The IR core methods and techniques are those for designing and developing IR systems, Web search engines, and tools for information storing and querying in Digital Libraries. IR core subjects are: system architectures, algorithms, formal theoretical models, and evaluation of the diverse systems and services that implement functionalities of storing and retrieving documents from multimedia document collections, and over wide area networks such as the Internet.
ESSIR is intended for researchers starting out in IR, for industrialists who wish to know more about this increasingly important topic and for people working on topics related to management of information on the Internet.
HISTORY OF ESSIR
ESSIR series started in 1990 coming out from the successful experience of the Summer School in Information Retrieval (SSIR) conceived and designed by Nick Belkin, Rutgers University, U.S.A., and Maristella Agosti, University of Padova, Italy, for an Italian audience in 1989. SSIR was organised by the Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (GLIR) of the Italian Computer Society (AICA) in July 1989 and was held at the Department of Electronics and Informatics (DEI), University of Padova, Italy.
The 1st edition, ESSIR 1990, was organised by Maristella Agosti of the University of Padova and held in Bressanone, Italy, in 1990.
The 2nd, ESSIR 1995, was organised by Keith van Rijsbergen of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and was held in Glasgow in 1995, in conjunction with a successful IR Festival.
The 3rd, ESSIR 2000, was jointly organised by Maristella Agosti, Fabio Crestani (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland), and Gabriella Pasi (Institute of Multimedia Technologies of the Italian National Council of Research, Milan, Italy), and was held in Villa Monastero, Varenna on the Como Lake, Italy, in 2000.
The 4th, ESSIR 2003, was organised by Catherine Berrut and Yves Chiaramella of the University "Joseph Fourier", Laboratoire CLIPS-IMAG of Grenoble, France, and was held at Aussois, in the south-east of France in 2003.
The 5th, ESSIR 2005, was organised by Alan Smeaton of Dublin City University, Ireland, and was held in Dublin, Ireland in 2005.
The 6th, ESSIR 2007, was organised by Iadh Ounis and Keith van Rijsbergen of the University of Glasgow and was held from 27th to 31st August 2007 in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom, hosted by the Information Retrieval Group of the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow.
The 7th, ESSIR 2009, was organised by Massimo Melucci (University of Padua) and Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Yahoo! Research Barcelona and Pompeu Fabra University) and was held from 31st August to 4th September 2009 at the University of Padua in Italy, hosted by the Information Retrieval Group of the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Padua.
One of ESSIR sponsoring and supporting organisations has been EIRSG-CEPIS, the European Information Retrieval Specialist Group under CEPIS, Confederation of European Professional Informatics Societies, which has provided a grant to be used to award a number of bursaries to support young students and researchers to attend ESSIR.
Invitation to Tender for Hosting of ESSIR 2011 Summer School |
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